Jason Recently wrote the the BAA:

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Jason Pisano. I am a 36-year-old male from West Warwick, RI, and I have Cerebral Palsy. For the past 14 years I’ve competed in you marathon ( 6 years unofficially & 8 in your Mobility Impaired division) . The first 4 years in your MI division were very good but the last 2 have been terrible ever since you changed all the starting times it has left me and many other of the athletes out on the course to fear for ourselves with traffic open, limited or no fluids, no energy gel, and having to race on the sidewalks! This no way to treat us or any of your other athletes! Not to mention you do all this to us and then we see the race director run the entire course with a full police escort after the entire race is over! Maybe he thinks his race and his life is more important than ours but I don’t! I can’t see why the NYC Marathon (a marathon twice the size and with like four times as many disabled! racers) can treat all there athletes so much better while Boston does such a poor job. Yesterday I raced for a charity and I still had to pay the full entry fee but did not receive any of the services I feel I deserved! I will be waiting for a timely response to this email or I will be contacting a lawyer and the media.

Respectfully,
~Jason Pisano
Frelance Journalist

The Guide Q Commented:

It makes you wonder what the purpose of the Boston Marathon is.
I understand that they want to limit the impact of the marathon on the towns along the route and also maintain their high qualification standards by keeping the race as short as possible, but the cost may be the very founding spirit of the marathon.
Legend says the when Pheidippides burst into the senate after his journey from Marathon to Athens, he exclaimed “Νενικήκαμεν”, which translates to “We have won”.
“We have won”, not “I have won”. We.
There are maybe a handful of people of the many thousands that run a marathon with hopes of the fastest time, and so it must follow that the winning is – not who comes in first, but something all together different.
No light, no fanfare, no cheering, no banner awaited Pheidppides on that first of marathons. And so it is with Jason Pisano.
What is your message when you burst throguh the doors of the senate? The message that has driven you the long hard journey, step by step, driven through pain and suffering with only your will to keep you going?
I am a purist, an idealist, so I remain unmoved by the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance, the false and easy message of “I have won”. It must be hard for people who carry that message to see Jason, so caught up in the “I”, they see that they have no excuse for their whining, their complaining, or even perhaps they see their accomplishments are not so great as they believed them to be.
What they should see is that, yes, they don’t have an excuse for whining and complaining. That what they’ve done is not all that it could be, that there are no limits.
That is the message of Pheidippides, of the Marathon, of Jason Pisano:
“Νενικήκαμεν”, WE have won.

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